Massage Chair Industry Update – April 10, 2013 (Video & Transcripts)

Alan: Hi, this is Dr. Alan Weidner from ‘Massage-Chair-Relief.com,’ and today is our April 10th massage chair industry update for 2013. I appreciate you being here today. We’ve got some good stuff to go over with you.

[SCREEN TEXT: Stock Status]

Alan: First of all, as usual, we’ll go over the stock status for the different chairs. Human Touch is in stock, Inada is in stock, Infinity is in stock, from what I understand Cozzia is in stock, and Omega is in stock.

[SCREEN TEXT: Panasonic MA70 Back-Ordered]

Alan: The only things that are back-ordered right now are the MA70 from Panasonic, and I had thought that we had good stock on that. Apparently they have over-sold that chair. It’s become quite a popular chair. So the MA70 is going to be back-ordered for about another month or so. From talking to Ed Cini from Panasonic, he tells me that they’re trying to increase production to get the chairs here a little earlier, a little sooner, but plan on at least another month for the MA70s to be here. The 30007 from Panasonic is in stock, so the other chairs are in stock, just not the MA70. Now, Osaki has some back orders. The OS-4000, all colors are back-ordered but they will be in stock next week. The Osaki 3000, they only have ‘Black’ and ‘Charcoal,’ and the other colors will be in at the end of April or May.

[SCREEN TEXT: Design Changes Coming for Osaki OS-3000]

Alan: There’s going to be some changes to the styling of the OS-3000. I can’t go into details on that now; I’ve heard a little bit about what it’s supposed to look like, but nothing firm. So, hopefully in another couple of weeks I’ll be able to have more information on that. But the OS-3000 styling will change, so we’ll have new images on the website representing the new styling of the OS-3000. The 3000 and the 4000 are virtually identical chairs as far as the way they look; the difference is some features. So, I believe they will probably be taking a different styling from one of their previous chairs and kind of mixing it with the 3000 and coming up with a new hybrid. But, anyway, it’s FYI.

The OS-7075R is in good stock in all colors except for the ‘Cream,’ they only have two left of the ‘Cream.’ And the OS-7200 is in good stock, and the OS-1000, they only have ‘Black’ color; the other colors will not be available for four to five more weeks. So that is it for the stock status.

[SCREEN TEXT: Video Interview With Mark Holmes, COO Cozzia]

Alan: Last week, I finally was able to meet and do an interview with Mark Holmes – I had mentioned this before – from Cozzia; he is the Chief Operating Officer of Cozzia. And we had about a 45-minute interview last week on Skype, and I’ve got that video. I’m just editing it to get it ready and breaking it up into three different little shorter videos so it’s not one long video for you, but those interviews should be ready either later this week or early next week up on YouTube. But it was a great interview; Mark is a great guy, really easy to visit with, he was very forthright and forthcoming with information about the company, about the industry, and it was a great interview and I’m quite excited to share that with you. So stay tuned for the three-part interview with Mark Holmes, COO of Cozzia. He was in Hong Kong when we recorded the video; of course, I was here in Salt Lake. But he spends a good portion of his time there in China. He lives there and he works out of the Cozzia factory in Xiamen, China, but then he comes to the United States for shows and for other promotional things for the company. Interesting company, they’re very involved in manufacturing; it’s not just massage chairs, which has been recently with the Cozzia line, they’ve been manufacturing massage chairs for decades and other products as well. It’s quite a robust and accomplished company. Anyway, that is the interview.

[SCREEN TEXT: iRobotics 6 Remote Control Improvement]

Alan: You know, we’re having some fun with this iRobotics 6 from Luraco. We had the test unit in our showroom weeks ago, and one thing we saw was happening was the remote control kept shorting out. And I’ve a number of people sit on it, and all the lights on the fritz, and on the back of the chair down by the power switch, there’s some other light indicators – if there’s a problem, those lights will go off – and you’ll know exactly what the problem is. Well, it kept telling me that there was a problem with the remote, so I’d send the remote back to Luraco, they’d send me a new one; same problem within a few days, send it back. Well, as it turns out, the chairs are assembled and for the most part manufactured in Dallas, and Texas apparently in quite a humid environment. I’ve not been there, I don’t know it well, but Utah is very dry and we have the chair on our showroom carpet. And when you walk on the carpet, there’s a static electricity that’s created, and when you touch the remote, bang, there’s a little spark and it shorts out the remote.

Well, they had no idea that this was going on, and of course if it hadn’t been for the chair being in our showroom in the dry state of Utah, they would never have found that out, at least before it had gotten to a customer’s home. And so they changed out the remote; they sent me a brand new remote this week. What it had was a chrome strip around the remote, and that was the thing that was inducing the shortage when we touched it. It would spark on that chrome. Well, they’ve changed that to more of a rubber or plastic; it’s not a bright silver, it’s more of a white color and it doesn’t look like chrome. It just looks like a piece of plastic around there, or rubber. But it works great, and so far – knock on wood and fingers crossed – there’s no problems with that remote.

But it’s kind of fun to experience a new chair and to be kind of a beta tester for them and see these little tiny things that can go wrong with it, and get it resolved quickly and promptly. That’s one of the advantages of them being in Dallas, here in the United States, is that they can make changes promptly to a chair if there is an issue.

[SCREEN TEXT: Software Updates for iRobotics 6]

Alan: I might also add – and I think I mentioned this two weeks ago – they will have software updates for their chairs. So, if there’s something in the programming that needs to be redone – if they want to change a program or change some feature of a chair or some feature of the function of the motor or the function of the airbags or however the chair plays out through the software – it can be updated and changed. It’s pretty cool.

[SCREEN TEXT: New Massage Chair Videos on YouTube]

Alan: OK, since our last massage chair industry update, I’ve put up a couple of videos that you might find interesting. One is a video of the Thera-Elliptical Kneading of the calf massage in the Inada YuMe chair, and it’s a fascinating feature. Whenever comes out with a new chair, they always come out with some kind of an innovation with that chair. The chairs they put out are not close to but not quite the same as the previous model; they’re very different chairs, and the YuMe is a very different chair from the Sogno. Well, the YuMe has this innovative calf massage that doesn’t just compress the calves like all other airbags do; it does have airbags, but it doesn’t just compress. The walls of the calf wells in the YuMe go up and down your calf, so it actually kneads your calf. It’s phenomenal, I’ve never felt anything like it. And of course the YuMe also has rocking, and we will have a video of that up soon enough as well.

But there is a video for that, and there is a video for the shoulder airbags of the MA70. The MA70 has airbags that inflate on the outside of your shoulders, kind of pinning your shoulders in. It’s not so much of a massage of the deltoids, which are the muscles that are on the outside of your shoulders; it’s more of a compression massage – if you want to call it a massage – to try to pin you in so that when the rollers go up and down your back, it’s far more intense.

[SCREEN TEXT: New Blog Posts]

Alan: We also have had a couple of blog posts since then. One is a review I did on the ZeroG 4.0 from Human Touch. You know, I’ve got this chair in the showroom, and the more I sit on it, the more I like it. It’s a very simple chair; it doesn’t have all the airbag fluff of a lot of other chairs, but it’s a very compact, quality massage chair. I really enjoy the massage. The foot and calf massages are paddles and not airbags, and it’s a fantastic massage. It feels like it’s got rollers under the feet, and the massage itself goes lower into the lower back than previous models of Human Touch’s chairs. And you can adjust the intensity of the upper back and the lower back independent of each other. It’s really a great little chair, I really like it. I did the review on it, so you can check that out on my blog. We’ll be doing more videos on it and posting more videos on it as well.

And also, I did an article about the ways that massage chairs can change intensity. And there’s basically two ways – I talk about this in the blog post – a massage chair’s intensity can be adjusted, if the company has set it up this way. One is through what they call a 3D roller system; Inada pioneered this with the Sogno. But all the rollers on massage chairs go up-and-down and side-to-side, like this. Well, before the Sogno came out, there was no massage chair that had the rollers go forward as well, so up-and-down, side-to-side, and forward. Well, that is what Inada pioneered and now a lot of other chairs are having that 3D massage function where the rollers can actually move forward and push your body further forward, thus increasing the intensity of the massage. The other way is through airbags, and Human Touch had a clever way of doing this. Rather than the rollers moving forward and back, which was something that was not really part of the innovations of the time, they had airbags on the side of the chair along the side of the spine that would either push forward – now, this is not the rollers that would push forward, it’s the airbags that would push forward – thus taking your body further away from the rollers and decreasing the intensity. And then to increase the intensity you would deflate the airbags in the sides of the chair back, and it would bring your body closer to the rollers and that would increase the intensity. Very clever – both ways are wonderful ways, but I think that 3D rollers now seem to be the way to go, and I believe that Human Touch in their immersion seating now has the 3D rollers as well. So, anyways, that is it for my blog posts and new videos that are up.

And as a matter of fact, I believe that is it for this week. It’s a short video. If you have any questions, feel free to email me or call me on our toll-free number, 888-259-5300. I’m always available, and if I’m not immediately available, leave a message and I will call you back. If you’ve enjoyed this video, please feel free to ‘Like’ it on YouTube or share it and ‘Like’ it on Facebook or Twitter or any other mode of sharing. We appreciate you getting the word out about massage chairs and helping us let the general population know how valuable these things are for everybody, and please feel free to subscribe to our channel so you can get subsequent updates to the massage chair industry or subsequent videos on other massage chairs that we put out. Again, I’m Dr. Alan Weidner from ‘Massage-Chair-Relief.com.’ It was great to visit with you today, thanks so much for being here, and we’ll see you in two more weeks. Bye-bye.

President of Massage Chair Relief, Dr. Weidner is a leading expert in the massage chair industry. His articles, videos, interviews, website, and industry updates have become the resources of choice for those researching which massage chair is best for them.